The wolrd is a crookedly beautiful place. The stoccato beat of an old worn jump rope cracking against warped pavement, the smoke that rises from the cigarette of a worker on break slumped against the side of a building. Families laughing outside about something that’s not funny because it’s Easter and there are miracles and laughing feels good. A small child wails about unevenly dispersed candy; a grandmother leans the heels of her palms on the counter, sighing at the amount of work but smiling at her grandchildren. And so the earth is beautiful and laughter shakes it into spinning, and nobody can be too sad on Easter.

And so I’m starting a list of 100 things I like about life.

1. The way you can slide back into a good book without the characters even noticing you were gone. They embrace you back into the world that’s not your own and keep on moving forward with something that is beautiful and precious and brilliant.

2. The way my laughter can’t be supressed and ruptures the barrier of ‘don’t’ so when I think something’s funny everybody knows it and the way laughter racks my body soundlessly until the last hiccup.

3. English class. Everything–every detail–about it. My teacher’s laugh at how ridiculous the boys in the class are and the way almost every single person in my class has come to me for help with an assignment. The independence to work on writing assignments and the truth exposed in that hour. Just an hour, but a perfect one.

4. Anagrams because they show how the same letters could have been used differently and because often times those anagrams are just different ways of saying the same thing in the original word. They show that if you didn’t like it one way, you can change it to the other and it won’t matter much.

5. Books that smell of must when you fan their pages and hold their spine to your nose. I wholeheartedly believe this smell should be bottled and sold and worn on the wrists and necks of female bibliophiles everwhere. It would certainly attract the bookish men, and that would be a lot easier than some other ways to go about it.

6. John Green. He is amazingly brilliant and insightful and kind and caring and the author of the books who are a part of me.

I don’t want to drag this list on for today, so there’ll be more of it tomorrow. And also, I’ve got a date with my bookshelf.